THE NEW YOR.KER. seems that the Ibaraki prefecture, in which Tsukuba Science City and its environs are situated, has never had much political clout and thus came a cropper when bullet-train courses were laid out.) The J oban line is so old- fashioned that it still has grade cross- ings. To get to the Expo station from the U eno rail terminal in T okyo- which itself requires some getting to- takes about an hour. To get to the fairgrounds from the station involves a twenty-minute ride in a shuttle bus. What it all comes down to is that the transportation setup for this suppos- edly futuristic fair is close to medieval. As a M ainichi Daily News correspon- dent wrote of the Tokyo-Expo axis, "so near, and yet so far." If someone staying at a downtown Tokyo hotel wishes to spend a day at the fair, he had better set aside between five and six hours' round-trip travel time and expect, like as not, to stand up each way, on both the train and the shuttle bus. One might have hoped for some- thing better from a nation whose taxi- cab doors are praiseworthil y opened from the driver's seat. (There are, to be sure, some buses that run straight from capital city to fair site, but they are apt to get stuck in heavy traffic; there is also helicopter service, with a one-way fare that can go as high as seventy-five dollars. ) "We ask you please to remain seated while the bus is moving," chants a cheerful taped voice, in Japanese and English, once the shuttle bus gets under way-a re- quest that risks irritating many stand- ees, and particularly those who have stood on the train or spent several hours traipsing around the fair- grounds. When toward the end of one long day's tramp I asked an English- speaking fellow-fairgoer who had just emerged from a mock trip into space what he thought of Expo '85 and its glimpses of things to come, he hesi- tated and then replied, "I have seen the future, and it's work." As fairs go, Expo '85 is a compara- tively no-nonsense one. There's a Fer- ris wheel that is reputed to be the biggest ever, and a ten-thousand- square-foot television screen-Sony's contribution to the proceedings- which can best be viewed from several blocks away, but there isn't any area set aside for amusement, as there has been at many a previous manifestation. If there were, it would have to com- pete, to its probable disadvantage, with a Disneyland that dug itself in perma- nently on the edge of Tokyo a couple of years ago. (In advance of a visit to -..ç - - " r l \ \ \. - 59 ( r :( ",c v \ ,! .. \-' : t '" ..... "' (j) jA4(11w ._...... '9' "We didn't meet in the Hamptons? Then where the hell did we meet? . Expo '85 by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, the first head of state to grace the fair with his presence, it was an- nounced that the royal itinerary would also include Disneyland.) The Sony JumboTRON, as the big screen is called, has been touted in some circles as Japan's answer to the Eiffel Tower, but, like everything else at the fair, it will be dismantled this fall, when the site is to be converted into an indus- trial park. In any event, Expo's ad- ministrators have been talking confi- dently about a total attendance, over the six-month span, of twenty million people, of whom between a million and a million and a half are expected to be foreigners-a perhaps not unre- alistic hope in view of the fact that last year slightly more than two million outlanders turned up in Japan for one reason or another. As an inducement to foreigners to visit Japan this sum- mer instead of, say, Kuala Lumpur or Truk, Tokyo hotels have forgone the customary imposition of taxes on rooms, food, and beverages. The pro- jected attendance total could easily be exceeded, of course, if every resident of Greater Tokyo, whose populatIon is now well over the twelve-million mark, went twice. One bank's survey of Japanese office workers disclosed that more than three-quarters of them hoped to get out to Tsukuba, but among the indigenes I broached the subject to there was less than unani- . mous enthusiasm to rush to the U eno terminal and board a Joban local-or even, if they were lucky, a quasi ex- press. One businessman told me, "I've never been to a world's fair in my life, but I suppose I'll have to go to this one if some American customer comes over who doesn't play golf." A sushi chef laid down his knife long enough one evening to say that he thought he might take his children to the fair eventually, perhaps in late August- but, then, he might play golf instead. And a sales clerk at the main TakashImaya department store, appar- ently in the grip of the Japanese work ethic, said he was afraid he might be too busy all summer to make the pil- grImage. Still, these may be exceptions, be- cause the fairgrounds have been jammed with Japanese day after day, many of them older folks trudging along in groups behind a flag-bearing leader. I saw very few people I could positively identify as Americans, even at the United States pavilion, which has a bar that dispenses Jack Dan- iel's, I. W. Harper, Early Times, Budweiser, Coca-Cola, and, I was proud to notice, N ew Yorker ice cream. Not long after taking part in the ribbon-cutting ceremonies at the pavilion, Mike Mansfield, who knows Japan well, having been our Ambassa- dor there since 1977, told me that it was his considered guess that most of